this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
270 points (86.1% liked)
science
22317 readers
324 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Am I the only one seing this as a misnomer? The statement is a composite of two statements: "This is a true statement" and "This is not a provable statement".
The "This is a true statement" part asserts truth. And, given nothing else to go of, we can assume the part true. "It's true that this is true". There just isn't any real statement being made. Taking the assumption is oerfectly valid, since we can disprove it at a later point.
The second statement, "This statement is not provable", is very much provable, since it also asserts almost nothing, just like the previous one. Its assertion is "I'm not provable", which is provably false.
Since the two sentences form a composite, we must compose the results of the previous two. We have a "true" and a "false". From the composite sentence we can infer the logical operation used to connect them: AND.
Thus we have a TRUE AND FALSE boolean expression, which has a resounding answer of FALSE.
I have to say, my system didn't prove it, but it evaluated it - unlike the authors, which claim to have proven the universe is forever ununderstandable to anyone and thus unable to be simulated.
That being said, my system seems to be perfectly consistent with itself, and, dare I say, quite grounded in reality.
You did not evaluate it. Composition of your statements does not equate to original one. "It is true" and "it is unprovable" correspond to the whole sentence, you cannot just divide it in two parts.